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_pfxa | 4 years ago
- I did not use it as a backup system. Due to circumstance, my backups were borked and I was too busy/poor to fix them up. Syncthing was used to sync my passwords, Org mode notes, and a specific two-way sync folder with the phone. Importantly, the first two were read only, i.e. the phone only had read access. Regardless, stuff on the remote, i.e the computer were deleted.
- I don't blame Syncthing because I lost my stuff or I had no backups. I blame them however because their software failed destructively. It should of course fail when the config file is weird, but deleting files on two devices despite permissions only allowing readonly access is tho unacceptable. This is kinda equivalent to nginx deleting your htdocs because a symlink in sites-enabled was broken or /.../sites-enabled was a file instead of a folder. If you don't have a backup of htdocs, that's your fault, but that doesn't mean it's a sane way to fail. The best way is to panic and tell the user: "I'm not touching files before this is fixed". Even rm(1) in coreutils has this sort of precautions, not allowing you to run "rm /" willy nilly.
- I should admit that I don't really make that distinction very clear in the blog post itself tho. It was written with anger after the incident, so I was not as nuanced/clear as I could've been.
- The point of the blog post was to advice against relying on Syncthing and to point out that its failure modes were coded sloppily. Tbf it was more like a note to self because never had analytics on my website so I had no idea if anybody read them with any frequency. I've seen it be linked from a couple places recently tho, and I haven't changed my mind, partly because I haven't been keeping up after seeing attitude like https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/4345
Afterwards I did go back to using syncthing for a while to sync files b/w laptop&phone but confined to a specific share folder only. After that brief period I've been relying on KDE Connect to push files between a Linux laptop and an Android phone. I botched backups a couple more times tho, as the big banner on the website testifies to.
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